Free Republic

President Donald Trump's transition team and outside allies have been signaling for weeks that they were planning to "flood the zone" in the first 100 days of the new administration. Former senior adviser and activist Steve Bannon had pushed this idea during Trump's first term, telling author and journalist Michael Lewis, "the Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” He called it "shock and awe," which was described by historian Douglas Brinkley as "bizarre, rapid-fire presidential policy making. * * * Rather than confusing...

That the incoming Trump administration will go after its political enemies, using all levers of state power to intimidate and persecute those who previously sought to hold the president-elect accountable, can no longer be portrayed as hysterical speculation, nor as something that would surely be opposed by cooler heads in a Republican-led Congress. Donald Trump ran as the candidate of “revenge” and "retribution," filling his meandering campaign speeches with complaints about those who had investigated him over his connections with Russia and incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Anyone hoping an electoral victory would spur a change in heart —...

An Idaho beauty salon owner said she is seeing customers “dropping like flies” after calling supporters of President-elect Donald Trump “racist, homophobic, and misogynistic.” Tiffney Prickett of Voiage Salon in Coeur d’Alene said she is “suffering the consequences of my own action” in a TikTok video posted days after the November election, saying that one of her longtime clients demanded a refund after she went on an anti-Trump tirade: @beautybytiffney It is the right thing to do. Period. #sorrynotsorry #humanrights ♬ original sound – Tiffney

A former Dallas salon owner who was jailed for re-opening her salon during COVID-19 will now be the next state representative for Texas House District 62. Shelley Luther won the election with nearly 80 percent of the vote. Luther received nearly 67,000 votes to defeat Democrat challenger Tiffany Drake in the far North Texas legislative seat election. In April 2020, Breitbart Texas reported that Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins (D) ordered that Luther be jailed for contempt of his order to close her business during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Dallas police came to her salon several times allegedly responding to...

Shelley Luther, the former Dallas salon owner who was jailed after reopening her salon during the COVID-19 pandemic, is heading to the Texas state house. Luther defeated Democrat Tiffany Drake Tuesday night, earning more than 75 percent of the vote to win in Texas House District 62. Luther made national headlines when she reopened her far North Dallas salon in defiance of countywide restrictions. She was jailed for seven days in 2020 after a Dallas County judge found her guilty of civil and criminal contempt of court. Luther was fined $1,000 for each day her salon, Salon à la Mode,...

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’s Democratic running mate in the 2024 race for the White House, is scaring “MAGA men” by subverting the traditional patriarchy and “offering living proof their tormented masculinity is yesterday’s news” according to an essay in Salon magazine. The commentary, contributed by Christopher Cotton, is a long piece that sets out the argument a revolution is reshaping how men view themselves in society and it is being led from the front by Walz and his “dad” vibes despite this being the man critics point out signed laws that install tampon-dispensing machines in K-12...

A Salon writer has been roasted on social media for blaming the “male rage fuelling MAGA” for the recent incidents of women being punched in the face in New York City. The leftist website published bizarre and unfounded claims in an article authored by Amanda Marcotte that the same misogyny behind Trump supporters animated the brutal attacks. The article reads: “These stories resonate, as well, because the nation is having a moment of increasingly unhinged male fury at women for daring to have lives that are centered around something other than catering to a man’s every whim. Unleashed by Donald...

A Michigan hair salon is facing a discrimination charge over a social media post earlier this year that declared transgender customers were “not welcome” and instead should “seek services at a local pet groomer.” In the charge filed on Wednesday, the state’s Department of Civil Rights claimed a July Facebook post made by Traverse City’s Studio 8 Hair Lab owner Christine Geiger violated the state’s civil rights act by unlawfully discriminating against three claimants. “If a human identifies as anything other than a man/woman please seek services at a local pet groomer. You are not welcome at this salon. Period,”...

Today’s Republicans, as well as Christian nationalism, are a greater threat to the United States than the Hamas terrorist organization, which is responsible for scores of terror attacks including the most recent massacre of over 1,000 civilians — according to a recent Salon piece that is drawing fierce backlash for the “gross” assertion.Following the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust, Salon magazine published an essay declaring MAGA Republicans and Christian supporters a “bigger threat” to America than the Hamas terrorist perpetrators.The Thursday essay, titled “MAGA and Christian nationalism: Bigger threat to America than Hamas could ever be,”...

In a year of awful political takes, this has to rank near the top of the list. A former Playboy correspondent and deranged Trump hater wrote a sickening piece in far-left Salon today calling supporters of the 45th President and faithful Christians more dangerous to the world than the Hamas savages trying to destroy Israel. Needless to say, conservatives responded in fury and savagely ripped him apart for this nasty, un-American take. Brian Karem, the “journalist,” actually had the gall to proclaim peaceful patriots who want to restore America back to her former greatness are WORSE than medieval savages who...

<p>1. ..........Cruz is a fierce ideologue: He denies the existence of man-made climate change, rejects same-sex marriage, wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, believes the 2nd amendment guarantees everyone a right to guns, doesn’t believe in a constitutional divide between church and state, favors the death penalty, opposes international agreements, embraces a confrontational foreign policy, rejects immigration reform, demands the repeal of “every blessed word of Obamacare,” and takes a strict “originalist” view of the meaning of the Constitution.</p>

The playbook the pimps of war use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a "rules-based international order" is at stake. Victory is assured.The results are also the same. The justifications and narratives are exposed as lies. The cheery prognosis is false. Those on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as venal as those we are fighting against.The Russian invasion of Ukraine was...

The time has come to “move on” from President Joe Biden, according to a recent Salon piece that argues the president served as a “drag” on Democrats during last week’s midterm election and that Democrats won in the midterm elections “despite Biden, not because of him,” adding that a 2024 presidential run by Biden would be a complete “disaster.” The Saturday essay — titled “Biden was a drag on the Democrats in the midterms: He’d be a disaster in 2024” — was penned by frequent Salon contributor Norman Solomon, who founded the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA), which is reportedly...

Tuesday night, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming lost the Republican primary by 37 points to Harriet Hageman. Cheney has drawn relentless fire from Donald Trump for being one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. Hageman, on the other hand, ran on a platform of advocating Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election and denouncing efforts to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Late Tuesday, Trump gloated about Cheney's loss, posting that "Cheney should be ashamed of herself" for standing up against Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The very next day,...

"The melee led to the deaths of five people and injuries to over 100 Capitol Police officers, but it would have been significantly worse if the insurrectionists had mounted an gun-powered incursion." Still beating this drum....disingenuous trash. There was one person killed that day. An unarmed protester, by police.

A man in China is stunned after being quoted a standard price for a haircut and then being told afterwards the price was 12 times higher. Baidu A hair salon in China is under investigation for telling a customer a hair perm and styling cost 398 yuan (S$83) but afterwards charged him 4,776 yuan under a bizarre system whereby they divided his scalp into 12 “sections” with each costing the quoted price for the service. The man, surnamed Liu, went to the Zhenxuan Hair Salon in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, eastern China, last week to have a hair perm and styling. A...

The GOP has morphed from an “evil insect” into a full-blown “terrorist organization,” according to a recent Salon piece that accused Republicans and Trump supporters of seeking a war against American democracy, encouraging widescale violence against the left and minorities, and using “stochastic terrorism” to achieve their aims. Titled “At last the Republican Party comes clean: It stands for terrorism and Trump, against democracy,” penned by staff writer Chauncey DeVega, the Monday Salon essay begins by labeling the Republican Party an “evil” terror group. “In the year-plus since the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the Republican Party has morphed, like...

CNN's Jake Tapper is one of the most well-known television journalists in the US. Tapper values truth, transparency, honesty, and kindness, according to interviews. He's naturally skeptical and, to remain neutral, he doesn't vote. Politico says he could be the best current television interviewer in the US. He grew up in a Philadelphia "hippy" household, but one focused on what was right and wrong. After three years he left Washington City Paper to become the Washington Correspondent for Salon. His editor at the time Joan Walsh said it was clear that he wasn't ideologically driven. Tapper's wife says her husband...

According to a recent article by the left-wing Salon, multiple former employees of Luntz have come forward to raise ethical questions about Luntz’s business, which focuses on public policy polling and focus groups to inform politicians and political parties as well as Fox News, MSNBC, and CNBC. Accusations range from Luntz’s operation being a “scam” that violates codes of ethics to Luntz’s business being “bullsh^t”. Salon spoke extensively to Chris Ingram, a former senior vice president at the Luntz Research Company during the late 1990s and early 2000s, who told the publication that “Luntz’s claim to deliver objective data is...

There’s a moral and ethical case to be made for abortion, according to two experts writing for Salon.Earlier this month, Salon published a piece examining “Why the case against abortion is weak, ethically speaking.” Nathan Nobis, an associate professor of philosophy at Morehouse College, and Jonathan Dudley, a postdoctoral fellow in molecular genetic pathology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, argued that abortion supporters should employ ethics to undercut the pro-life position. They went so far as to propose a few “ethical arguments” of their own – arguments rife with fallacies.That’s because the pro-life stance is a solid one: Life is precious,...